I launched Pizza Rules! more than 2 years ago with what I was planning to be short-term design and technology solutions. After not too long, the blogging system I built the site on (MovableType) started to break and become tedious, especially because it was being hosted on a less-than-ideal server. If that weren’t bad enough, the commenting system was a pain to deal with and discouraged any easy dialogue. As such, my posts became less frequent and carelessly composed. As is the case with many personal labor-of-love projects (i.e. non-paying), the site took a back seat to other issues in my life.

Now, partially inspired by this year’s Pizza Month challenge, it brings me great pleasure to announce that I’ve totally revamped the site with a new blogging system (WordPress), a better hosting service, and a newly updated design! The site now offers new functionality which I never got around to implementing in the first version, and should be generally easier to browse.

Internet pizza dorks may get a familiar tingle from the new red and white checkered background here on Pizza Rules! … it serves as a nod to an old design for Slice – “America’s favorite pizza weblog” (I would argue the world’s favorite) – which has since been rebranded, sans-checkers. With kind encouragement from Slice‘s frontman, Adam Kuban, I’ve carried on the tablecloth theme here with my own cruder, brighter, and more literal take on the concept.

As with any relaunch, there are bound to be a few bugs kicking around, and I’ll likely continue to tweak design elements on a continuing basis. If you see anything that seems broken, please drop me a note in the comments or at nick@nicksherman.com. Also feel free to let me know about any site features you’d like to see added in the future, or design tweaks you think might improve the experience.

I discovered by pure chance that yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the current incarnation of Pizza Rules!

This reminds me about the task I’ve been meaning to address for so long of updating the site to be more easily browsable; which, in turn, reminds me how much I regret setting up the back-end of this site the way I did.

The blog software I use to run Pizza Rules! has been super slow and sometimes even completely broken lately, which is why I haven’t posted much. I have a whole folder of stuff to share once I get some time to fix everything, but in the mean time, here’s a quick pizza-related lolcat for you.